


Rain

by sobrecogimiento



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pre-Stanford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:17:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sobrecogimiento/pseuds/sobrecogimiento
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's leaving for Stanford, the night of the announcement and the morning after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rain

He had a right to this, a right to feel this indignant and cling stubbornly to it, because he’d approached the matter with as much caution and foresight as he could, and, as stupid as it was in retrospect, he had never envisioned it would turn out this badly. 

A hunter, of all people, should respect defying the odds. It was central to their lives, and every-day struggle, running right into and springing traps and destroying things made to kill, the things nightmares are made of. It was a thing no one should rightly survive, despite the fact that so many did, but John had done it for nearly eighteen years, despite starting out blind with grief and with a near death-wish. No one had ever had to tell Sam he was a smart boy, but that had never stopped his teachers and temporary, false friends who only knew his plastic, disposable surface, or his father, or his brother, or other hunters that served as surrogate aunts and uncles and family friends in this insane life. In his head, the logistics of it worked out like this:

He would break the news of his hard-won full ride to an amazing fucking college when his father was between hunts and sober, not drunk on booze or injuries or painkillers or the last terrible thing he had seen, and John would not be happy. John would tell him he had shaped into a damn fine hunter in the last year, John would tell him that they needed him, John would tell him that the family and his never-ending, hopeless quest came first. And then, what was supposed to happen, was that John would wake up and be his father again, let him have his life with nothing more than a challenge, a You try it, son. See if you can be normal. Sam would say, Yes, sir, in defiance, and do his damnedest to prove him wrong.

What really happened was this:

Sam got the first sentence out his mouth—Stanford University offered me a full ride for four years, and I’m going to college—and the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees over Dean’s silent judgment from his witness stand by the sink and Sam’s quiet anticipation and the damnation of a piece of paper placed before their father at the kitchen table. 

There was a moment of static, the instant before the lightning bolt hits, before the tsunami devastates a dozen coastal cities, the silence before the storm. And Dean had said, He’s not gonna like this man, he’s gonna blow your head off, Sammy, before he lets you leave, but Dean did not get to say I told you so.

Dean had failed to predict that Sam’s ability to drink Twinings English Breakfast Tea would be gone forever because when the static moment passed John threw a mug full of it at Sam’s head, and then it was gone, shattered against the far wall like the first shot fired because those who fight in the name of ideology will not stop for any truce, even in the face of certain death.

It was, in Sam’s opinion, entirely out of proportion.

The smell of tea, he knew already, would stay with him forever, the untimely death, a gravestone splatter against the wall as his father yelled at him, Dean’s green eyes wide in fear and disbelief—not even he believed it could be  _this_  bad. 

How dare you, John screamed, but Sam heard it far away, muted under the weight of his shock and the smell of tea and his stone-statue brother with emeralds for eyes. How fucking dare you Samuel Winchester that is a betrayal to this family you know what’s out there you selfish little shit, you know what we do how dare you think you can run away and leave us alone when we need you, after what happened to your mother, school is fucking over and it is time for reality to penetrate your thick fucking skull and for you to grow into your responsibilities to the job and this family.

But I don’t want to leave you, Sam told him, quiet protest humbled beneath that onslaught. None of us are responsible for what happened to mom, and I don’t want this life, and no matter what she is never coming back, why can’t you see that?

John trembled visibly, probably wanted to punch him, but refrained. Fine, boy, he spat. If you want to leave, you fucking leave, but don’t you dare come back, you hear me? If you’re gonna be gone, you make sure you are by the time I’m back in this house because if I see you leaving so help me God I will not be responsible for the beating I give you.

And then he left, engine of his newly acquired truck roaring to life, a wholly unnecessary further testament to his anger. Sam turned to his frozen brother, a plea in his eyes, oh-god-what-just-happened, a need for something indefinable. But Dean just shook his head, stiff, jerky motion that spoke magnitudes.

“God, Sammy, you idiot,” he said brokenly. “I can’t, I fucking can’t right now, ok? You just don’t—”

He broke off, ran a hand over his face, looking trapped, devastated, eyes fixing momentarily on Sam with a sort of screaming intensity that scared him, scared both of them badly, worse than their father had.

“God damn it, Sam,” Dean said, eyes dry but voice already in tears, and then he was gone too, the Impala shrieking and burning rubber down the street, and left Sam alone.

The kitchen was a too-bright yellow in this rented townhouse, now accented with a bitter aftertaste and a tea stain on the wall. The acceptance letter lay on the table innocently, unaware of the harm it had caused, and Sam was numb.

It was raining.

It was raining, and hours later Sam couldn’t sleep.

This was a steady Texas rain, had been going for days and would continue for more, currently releasing buckets, a deluge, Great Flood weather, but Sam’s pretty sure he’s the only one in his family who believes in God. He’s praying now, because he’s so fucking worried about them, his father and his brother in their respective bars, drowning in booze and then stumbling out into the late-night-early-morning, flying in drunken zig-zags down the rain-slick roads. He imagines a thousand horrible deaths that have nothing to do with anything supernatural and prays against them all, heart pounding sickly, bile in his throat and nails digging crescents into his palms, tinged red like a sacrifice.

By the time the door opens his nerves are so fucking keyed that he nearly scrapes eight neat stripes of skin off his hands, heart flies out of his mouth along with whatever the fuck he last ate, but he manages to sit up silently, like he’s tracking something that will turn around and kill him the second he breathes too offensively, and when a figure barges past the closed door by sheer willpower and practically falls into his room, it takes all of his remaining energy not to scream. 

It’s Dean, of fucking course it’s Dean, and he’s too drunk to walk, not even God knows how the fuck he got home, soaking wet because he probably keyed the door to shit trying to get in, standing there toasted in the rain. 

“Sammy,” Dean says, with great effort, standing over the bed and swaying dangerously.

At his name, Sam scrambles up, gets his hands on his brother to steady him, incredibly angry and grateful and belatedly terrified all at once, because as god-awful as he feels about it, if it was between Dean and Dad, he’d choose Dean, choose him in a fucking heartbeat.

“Jesus fuck, Dean,” Sam mutters, pushing the waterlogged jacket off his shoulders and tossing it in the corner, deciding on the same course of action for his shirt. “What did you do, go swimming?”

“Sammy,” Dean says, hands pawing at Sam’s face and they’re wet, he tastes rainwater, his heart is stuttering, beating against his ribcage like a trapped bird because this was not supposed to happen, this has been going on for years and they long ago reached a silent, tacit agreement that this would never happen, something with such incredible potential to break them. 

But Sam is paralysed, and it is suddenly unthinkable to make his brother let go. “Dean,” he answers, uncertainly, suspended and refusing to think about this, to think about anything.

“Wanted him to stop you,” Dean breathes, cradling Sam’s face, breath full of Guinness and Captain Morgan, gonna be feeling that in the morning. “Wanted him to talk you out of going, don’t want you to go. But you. You’re gonna. Can’t ever really stop you, huh, stubborn bastard, Iloveyousofuckingmuch Sammy, not fair.”

It wasn’t a kiss so much as a train wreck, a fucking disaster, but Sam is holding onto his brother enough to bruise and within seconds is hard in his sweatpants, blindly fumbling at Dean’s belt-- _we’re going to hell for this and I don’t care_ \--and it feels like this is the only right course of action, in some surreal parallel reality, scenario of last-night-on-Earth.

Dean is, is too fucking drunk for this, but they have both taken John’s threat to heart and he is  _leaving_  tomorrow and he has this disproportionate, nagging feeling of what if something happens to them while he’s gone, what if something happened to John already, and he needs this in a vital way like blood and oxygen, can’t stand not to know. 

There will be stains on the carpet from Dean’s wet clothes, puddles from where he toed off his boots and socks and Sam helped him out of his jeans, more watermarked testimony left in this cheaply made house of this disastrous wreck of a night, Dean’s mouth bruising his collarbone. This no longer matters because our fathers are our model for god, Sam knows, and neither of them will ever be around to see this. 

The measure of who you really are, it’s what you do when no one will find out. And Dean, Dean is half of him, might as well be the same person where it counts, they’re in this together. To Sam this is like a fever dream, not lucid, out of his control, and as unbearably false as that is he can’t stop. Dean is shoving their mouths together in a desperate parody of a kiss, Dean is rubbing against him frantically, Dean is pulling him into bed, and Sam goes with him, falling, falling so far.

“Haven’t. Haven’t done this,” Dean slurs, holding onto Sam’s face. “What do. Have you. What do you do?”

Sam has. Dean’s only done it with girls and Sam’s done it with both, fucked into warm and willing bodies and didn’t see them, saw someone else and every time bit back the name trying to force its way past his lips, but he’s a virgin  _that_  way and has a feeling Dean knows it. Blindly, Sam reaches over the side of his bed for his backpack, for the tube hidden at the bottom and pushes it into Dean’s hands, seals their fate, damnation at the end of this road but the fall is worth it. Sam doesn’t know how Dean is still sober enough to stay awake for this, wonders if it would be better or worse if he passed out now, if Sam were able to drag him into his own room and deny this ever happened. But it’s happening, and Dean’s eyes are wide spots of light in the darkness, and when Sam lets his head fall back on the pillow, Dean follows him down.

*  
For the next four years Sam will wonder what possessed him to stay in that run-down house and wait until his father came home, despite the explicit threat, to make sure he was still breathing and very much alive, to make sure that when he left he wasn’t leaving Dean alone. Sam wonders if John had known his threats were empty ones, because by the time he came back he was so far gone that he didn’t even make it out of his wet clothes or into bed, simply passed out on his bedroom floor and was in no condition to punish anyone except himself, which he was doing a remarkable job of already.

It was a testament to this thing called family that Sam helped his brother get their father out of most of his wet clothes and into bed, that the entire time he was crying silent, wrecked tears, at once guilty and resentful, his father should have been  _proud_  of him, damn it. He never should have made him so ashamed. 

When they’re done, Dean takes Sam’s tear-streaked face and kisses him, solace and comfort and strength, right there over their father’s catatonic form, and Sam is thinking wildly, this must be the twilight zone, because this is not something that could really happen, not with their father there, not in daylight. They are stuck at an in-between, but when Sam pulls away and sees all the floods and fires in Dean’s blown-wide eyes, he knows that will stay with him. That will stay with him and haunt him forever, he loves him in such a fatal, all-consuming way.

Sam’s bags are already packed from his bout of panicked, jittery insomnia last night before Dean came home and fucked them both unconscious, so it is a silent, pitiful gathering on their way out the door, all his possessions in his backpack and duffel. Dean is frozen silent, a robot or a moving statue, grim-faced and both hands on the wheel as he drives, not even the familiar cacophony of the radio in the background; it’s not the environment for something that comforting. The day is made gray and frigid by the rain, and it splatters on the windows and the windshield and runs, runs, runs and disappears.

They have been parked at the near-deserted Greyhound station for twenty minutes and Sam still can’t bring himself to move. 

“I can’t take it back,” he says, causing both of them to jump, too loud in this muffled, rain-filled silence. 

“I know, I know,” Dean says, a gruff, low murmur. His eyes are fixed on his lap, something relatively safe. 

Sam is broken apart by him. He is in love with his brother and that’s half the reason he wanted to leave, because he didn’t want to fuck them up, and now Sam is addicted from his first hit, and is suddenly terrified of withdrawal. Dean has removed half of Sam’s reason for leaving, and he feels duped, like he didn’t read the fine print before signing his name.

“Dean,” Sam whispers, and Dean’s head jerks up and meets him like an electric shock, and then he’s crawling into the passenger seat and Sam is dragging him over.

“Why are you leaving,” Dean accuses against his mouth. “Why do you have to go?”

There’s no answer for that, a rhetorical question. “You can come with,” Sam says, and Dean freezes, ice and terror against him, the possibility. Sam amends, “Any time you want to come out there, you can, I don’t care what I’m doing or who I’m fucking, I will always have space for you. Always.” He kisses him, and wonders which one of them is crying. 

Leaving feels like being stretched to the breaking point. Sam can feel a terrible, physical reminder of exactly what Dean did to him every time they go over a bump in the road, and he knows that when he is in California he will scare up a job and a place to live and will be so sorely out of place in the academia, the shiny, brand-new life. The plastic face he has used everywhere, no one who really knows him. He knows Dean will go back to their father, that it will be a few weeks before either of them speaks to anyone in more than monosyllabic responses. He knows that he will adjust, or one day, Dean will come back for him because he needs him, because their father is too far away or just  _gone,_  and Dean will need him.

But right now, now he is going to college, and everything is becoming a lie. 

~End


End file.
